The problem of structure and motion recovery from image sequences is an important theme in computer vision. Considerable progress has been made in this field during the past two decades, resulting in successful applications in robot navigation, augmented reality, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, and digital entertainment, among other areas. However, many of these methods work only for rigid objects and static scenes. The study of non-rigid structure from motion is not only of academic significance, but also has important practical applications in real-world, nonrigid or dynamic scenarios, such as human facial expressions and moving vehicles.

This practical guide/reference provides a comprehensive overview of Euclidean structure and motion recovery, with a specific focus on factorization-based algorithms. The book discusses the latest research in this field, including the extension of the factorization algorithm to recover the structure of non-rigid objects, and presents some new algorithms developed by the authors. Readers require no significant knowledge of computer vision, although some background on projective geometry and matrix computation would be beneficial.

Topics and features: presents the first systematic study of structure and motion recovery of both rigid and non-rigid objects from images sequences; discusses in depth the theory, techniques, and applications of rigid and non-rigid factorization methods in three dimensional computer vision; examines numerous factorization algorithms, covering affine, perspective and quasi-perspective projection models; provides appendices describing the mathematical principles behind projective geometry, matrix decomposition, least squares, and nonlinear estimation techniques; includes chapter-ending review questions, and a glossary of terms used in the book.

This unique text offers practical guidance in real applications and implementations of 3D modeling systems for practitioners in computer vision and pattern recognition, as well as serving as an invaluable source of new algorithms and methodologies for structure and motion recovery for graduate students and researchers.

Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century: Visions of World Experts presents contributions from leading researchers and experts describing their current research and their views of the future trends in the field. The book consists of thirteen chapters in five parts. These chapters tackle a number of critical issues in distributed multimedia systems and applications - from VLSI processors that support multimedia and multimedia servers, through multimedia databases and multimedia networks and communications, to merging multimedia applications. Only a few years ago multimedia seemed like a brand new research field and an emerging new industry. Today, at the edge of the 21st century, multimedia research is coming of age, and the multimedia industry has significantly grown with the total market estimated to be about $50 billion. Several years ago it was felt that the digital media revolution had just started; however, the seeds had been sown long before. Fundamental technologies, such as interactive laser disks, video games, and electronic encyclopedias were invented in the 1970s and 80s. They represented the seeds for current hot' applications, such as digital libraries, video-on-demand, interactive television, and videoconferencing. Another aspect of the digital media revolution is the formation of a new media industry composed of computer, entertainment, communication, and consumer electronics companies. Many industry segments are currently involved in creating new products and services, positioning themselves for the 21st century. They include telephone, cable, and satellite TV companies, communication equipment companies, TV and radio broadcasters, on-line Internetservice providers, cable channels, movie studios, record companies, book publishers, CD-ROM title creators, Internet tool vendors, multimedia software tools companies, computer companies, general software tools companies, computer add-on vendors, semiconductor vendors, and consumer electronics vendors. Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century: Visions of World Experts should stimulate the curiosity of its readers and inspire new technological breakthroughs in this exciting field. It serves as a valuable reference for system designers, engineers, programmers, and managers who are involved in multimedia systems, the Internet, and their applications. This book can also be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia in engineering curricula.

Designing Effective and Usable Multimedia Systems presents research and development and industrial experience of usability engineering for multimedia user interfaces. The book discusses the methods, tools and guidelines for multimedia use and implementation and covers the following topics in detail: Design methods for multimedia (MM) systems; Social and cognitive models for MM interaction; Empirical studies of the effects of MM on learning and behavior; Design and prototyping support tools; Intelligent MM Systems and Design support; Usability evaluation. GBP/LISTGBP Designing Effective and Usable Multimedia Systems contains the proceedings of the International Working Conference on Designing Effective and usable Multimedia Systems, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), held in Stuttgart, Germany, in September 1998. It is essential reading for computer scientists, software developers, information systems managers and human scientists, especially those working in the applied disciplines such as human factors and interface design.

In 1997, the two hottest topics in information technology are the Internet and mobile communications. Each one has the enthusiastic attention of the consuming public, investors. and the technical community. In a time of rapid expansion, they both face technical obstacles to meeting the public's high expectations. This situation stimulates a high volume of research in both areas. To bring the Internet into the twenty-first century. the research community focuses on multimedia communications in which integrated systems store, transport. and process many types of information simultaneously. A major challenge is to meet the of each information service. This problem is separate performance requirements especially challenging when a system has to deliver broadband, real-time services such as full-motion video. Meanwhile. the mobile communications research community continues its long term struggle against the triple challenge of mobility. ether. and energy. "Mobility" refers to the changing locations of terminals. When terminals are mobile. networks have to determine their locations and dynamically establish routes for information. The networks also have to rearrange themselves in order to maintain links to terminals with active communications sessions. "Ether" refers to the problems of wireless communications including limited bandwidth. rapidly changing radio propagation conditions. mutual interference of radio signals. and vulnerability of systems to eavesdropping and unauthorized access. "Energy" refers to the fact that portable information devices carry their own power sources. The rate at which the batteries of cellular telephones and portable computers drain their energy has a strong effect on their utility."

This volume is the Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Entertainment Computing (IWEC 2002). Entertainment has been taking very important parts in our life by refreshing us and activating our creativity. Recently by the advancement of computers and networks new types of entertainment have been emerging such as video games, entertainment robots, and network games. As these new games have a strong power to change our lives, it is good time for people who work in this area to discuss various aspects of entertainment and to promote entertainment related researches. Based on these considerations, we have organized a first workshop on entertainment computing. This workshop brings together researchers, developers, and practitioners working in the area of entertainment computing. It covers wide range of entertainment computing such as theoretical issues, hardware/software issues, systems, human interfaces, and applications. The particular areas covered by the workshop are: 1. Computers & Games Computer game algorithms, modeling of players, web technologies for networked games, human interface technologies for game applications. 2. Home/Arcade Games and Interactive Movies Video game computer technologies, motion capture technologies, real-time computer graphics technologies, interactive movie systems, story generation for games/movies, human factors of video games.

This book presents a state-of-the art review of current perspectives on Communications and Multimedia Security. It contains the Proceedings of the 3rd Joint Working Conference of IFIP TC6 and TC11, arranged by the International Federation for Information Processing and held in Athens, Greece in September 1997. The book aims to cover the subject of Communications and Multimedia Systems Security, as fully as possible. It constitutes an essential reading for information technology security specialists; computer professionals; communication systems professionals; EDP managers; EDP auditors; managers, researchers and students working on the subject.

Packed with more than 350 techniques, this book delivers what you need to know-on the spot. Its concise presentation of professional techniques is suited to experienced artists whether you are: * Migrating from another visual effects application * Upgrading to Houdini 9 * Seeking a handy reference to raise your proficiency with Houdini Houdini On the Spot presents immediate solutions in an accessible format. It clearly illustrates the essential methods that pros use to get the job done efficiently and creatively. Screenshots and step-by-step instructions show you how to: * Navigate and manipulate the version 9 interface * Create procedural models that can be modified quickly and efficiently with Surface Operators (SOPs) * Use Particle Operators (POPs) to build complex simulations with speed and precision * Minimize the number of operators in your simulations with Dynamics Operators (DOPs) * Extend Houdini with customized tools to include data or scripts with Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs) * Master the version 9 rendering options including Physically Based Rendering (PBR), volume rendering and motion blur * Quickly modify timing, geometry, space and rotational values of your animations with Channel Operators (CHOPs) * Create and manipulate elements with Composite Operators (COPs); Houdini's full-blown compositor toolset * Make your own SOPs, COPs, POPs, CHOPs, and shaders with the Vector Expressions (VEX) shading language * Configure the Houdini interface with customized environments and hotkeys * Mine the treasures of the dozens of standalone applications that are bundled with Houdini

Representation and Retrieval of Visual Media in Multimedia Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date researcg results in this important area. Representation and Retrieval of Visual Media in Multimedia Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

Multimedia is changing the design of database and information retrieval systems. The accumulation of audio, image, and video content is of little use in these systems if the content cannot be retrieved on demand, a critical requirement that has led to the development of new technologies for the analysis and indexing of media data. In turn, these technologies seek to derive information or features from a data type that can facilitate rapid retrieval, efficient compression, and logical presentation of the data. Significant work that has not been addressed, however, is the benefits of analyzing more than one data type simultaneously. Computed Synchronization for Multimedia Applications presents a new framework for the simultaneous analysis of multiple media data objects. The primary benefit of this analysis is computed synchronization, a temporal and spatial alignment of multiple media objects. Computed Synchronization for Multimedia Applications also presents several specific applications and a general structure for the solution of computed synchronization problems. The applications demonstrate the use of this structure. Two applications in particular are described in detail: the alignment of text to speech audio, and the alignment of simultaneous English language translations of ancient texts. Many additional applications are discussed as future uses of the technology. Computed Synchronization for Multimedia Applications is useful to researchers, students, and developers seeking to apply computed synchronization in many fields. It is also suitable as a reference for a graduate-level course in multimedia data retrieval.

Welcome to the third International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services (MMNS'2000) in Fortaleza (Brazil) The first MMNS was held in Montreal ( Canada) in july 1997 and the second MMNS was held in Versailles (France) in November 1998. The MMNS conference takes place every year and a half and is aimed to be a truly international event by bringing together researchers and practitioners from all around the world and by organising the conference each time in a different continent/country. Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of research within the fields of multimedia networking and network management. Much of that work has taken place within the context of managing Quality-of Service in broadband integrated services digital networks such as the A TM, and more recently in IP-based networks, to respond to the requirements of emerging multimedia applications. A TM networks were designed to support multimedia traffic with diverse characteristics and can be used as the transfer mode for both wired and wireless networks. A new set of Internet protocols is being developed to provide better quality of service, which is a prerequisite for supporting multimedia applications. Multimedia applications have a different set of requirements, which impacts the design of the underlying communication network as well as its management. Several QoS management mechanisms intervening at different layers of the communication network are required including QoS-routing, QoS-based transport, QoS negotiation, QoS adaptation, FCAPS management, and mobility management."

Content-based multimedia retrieval is a challenging research field with many unsolved problems. This monograph details concepts and algorithms for robust and efficient information retrieval of two different types of multimedia data: waveform-based music data and human motion data. It first examines several approaches in music information retrieval, in particular general strategies as well as efficient algorithms. The book then introduces a general and unified framework for motion analysis, retrieval, and classification, highlighting the design of suitable features, the notion of similarity used to compare data streams, and data organization.

Information visualization offers a way to reveal hidden patterns in a visual presentation and allows users to seek information from a visual perspective. Readers of this book will gain an in-depth understanding of the current state of information retrieval visualization. They will be introduced to existing problems along with technical and theoretical findings. The book also provides practical details for the implementation of an information retrieval visualization system.

Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

This book addresses the changing role of networks and the evolving structure of an Infrastructure Superhighway. The requirements for leadership in telecommunications are reviewed from different viewpoints: Network operators, equipment manufacturers, software developers and user organizations. Emphasis is placed on multimedia and what multimedia solutions would mean to telephone utilities and endusers. Based on extensive research undertaken in Europe, US and Japan, Dimitris Chorafas identifies new domains of applications, presents the breakthroughs which have currently been achieved and outlines the systems solutions necessary to fruitfully exploit new technology.

The advent of multimedia technology is creating a number of new problems in the fields of computer and communication systems. Perhaps the most important of these problems in communication, and certainly the most interesting, is that of designing networks to carry multimedia traffic, including digital audio and video, with acceptable quality. The main challenge in integrating the different services needed by the different types of traffic into the same network (an objective that is made worthwhile by its obvious economic advantages) is to satisfy the performance requirements of continuous media applications, as the quality of audio and video streams at the receiver can be guaranteed only if bounds on delay, delay jitters, bandwidth, and reliability are guaranteed by the network. Since such guarantees cannot be provided by traditional packet-switching technology, a number of researchers and research groups during the last several years have tried to meet the challenge by proposing new protocols or modifications of old ones, to make packet-switching networks capable of delivering audio and video with good quality while carrying all sorts of other traffic. The focus of this book is on HeiTS (the Heidelberg Transport System), and its contributions to integrated services network design. The HeiTS architecture is based on using the Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST-II) at the network layer. The Heidelberg researchers were the first to implement ST-II. The author documents this activity in the book and provides thorough coverage of the improvements made to the protocol. The book also includes coverage of HeiTP as used in error handling, error control, congestion control, and the full specification of ST2+, a new version of ST-II. The ideas and techniques implemented by the Heidelberg group and their coverage in this volume apply to many other approaches to multimedia networking.

Soft computing represents a collection of techniques, such as neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, and probabilistic reasoning. As - posed to conventional "hard" computing, these techniques tolerate impre- sion and uncertainty, similar to human beings. In the recent years, successful applications of these powerful methods have been published in many dis- plines in numerous journals, conferences, as well as the excellent books in this book series on Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. This volume is dedicated to recent novel applications of soft computing in multimedia processing. The book is composed of 21 chapters written by experts in their respective fields, addressing various important and timely problems in multimedia computing such as content analysis, indexing and retrieval, recognition and compression, processing and filtering, etc. In the chapter authored by Guan, Muneesawang, Lay, Amin, and Lee, a radial basis function network with Laplacian mixture model is employed to perform image and video retrieval. D. Androutsos, P. Androutsos, Plataniotis, and Venetsanopoulos investigate color image indexing and retrieval within a small-world framework. Wu and Yap develop a framework of fuzzy relevance feedback to model the uncertainty of users' subjective perception in image retrieval.

Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.

Text mining applications have experienced tremendous advances because of web 2.0 and social networking applications. Recent advances in hardware and software technology have lead to a number of unique scenarios where text mining algorithms are learned.

Mining Text Data introduces an important niche in the text analytics field, and is an edited volume contributed by leading international researchers and practitioners focused on social networks & data mining. This book contains a wide swath in topics across social networks & data mining. Each chapter contains a comprehensive survey including the key research content on the topic, and the future directions of research in the field. There is a special focus on Text Embedded with Heterogeneous and Multimedia Data which makes the mining process much more challenging. A number of methods have been designed such as transfer learning and cross-lingual mining for such cases.

Mining Text Data simplifies the content, so that advanced-level students, practitioners and researchers in computer science can benefit from this book. Academic and corporate libraries, as well as ACM, IEEE, and Management Science focused on information security, electronic commerce, databases, data mining, machine learning, and statistics are the primary buyers for this reference book.

Multimedia information systems are distinct from traditional information systems, particularly in terms of scheduling, media data, servers, and a number of other important issues. The relatively large size of multimedia data and the high bandwidth requirements for multimedia streams require new storage systems, buffering, delivery, and networking schemes. This work addresses many of these issues by focusing on the following: Disk scheduling and storage hierarchy, Configuration of multimedia servers and buffer management, Delivery scheduling for multimedia streams, Supporting user interactions, Document modeling and temporal modeling of multimedia data, and Integrated multimedia information system. Chapters in this book have been written by well-known and leading researchers in the field. The material is original and includes the most recent research results on topics such as data retrieval from disks, server architecture, buffering, synchronization, and supporting user interactions. The material has been closely edited to form a uniform and cohesive compilation. Multimedia Information Storage and Management can be used for students studying multimedia information and applications. This work will also be of special interest to researchers and developers of multimedia software and hardware systems, network protocol designers, and multimedia tool designers.

Learning spaces offer a rigorous mathematical foundation for practical systems of educational technology. Learning spaces generalize partially ordered sets and are special cases of knowledge spaces. The various structures are investigated from the standpoints of combinatorial properties and stochastic processes.

Leaning spaces have become the essential structures to be used in assessing students' competence of various topics. A practical example is offered by ALEKS, a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system in mathematics and other scholarly fields. At the heart of ALEKS is an artificial intelligence engine that assesses each student individually and continously.

The book is of interest to mathematically oriented readers in education, computer science, engineering, and combinatorics at research and graduate levels. Numerous examples and exercises are included, together with an extensive bibliography.

Since multimedia systems are required to store and manipulate a variety of media types - including text, graphics, images, sound, audio, and video among many others - applications such as video-on-demand systems, interactive television, and video conferencing are becoming widely available at warp speed. This presents new challenges and obstacles to those in the multimedia industry. ""Multimedia Information Storage and Retrieval"" offers solutions to these challenges, providing data placement techniques, scheduling methods, caching techniques and emerging characteristics of multimedia information. Academicians, students, professionals and practitioners in the multimedia industry will benefit from this ground-breaking publication.

Representation and Retrieval of Video Data in Multimedia Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. Representation and Retrieval of Video Data in Multimedia Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.